Building Authority Not Links in 2018 for Better Rankings

If you needed to ask a question about a medical condition, you would find a medical professional to ask and if possible, a doctor. Your reasoning is simple, ask the person who is the authority on the subject that you are interested in and you should get the best and most complete answer to your question. This logic sounds fairly straight forward. And in a way, that is the same logic that gets you answers on the Internet. The search engine has algorithms that figure out which website is going to provide the best answer to the question, or search, that was posed. So being an authority on a topic is going to land you higher on the search results standing. And here are a few tips that can get you on the path of becoming an authority.

A good website is the first key to becoming an authority. This might sound overly simple but it is the truth. Customer satisfaction is another way to put it. The longer a visitor stays on your site the more positive the signal to the search engine. But, a slow loading site or a poorly organized site is going to eliminate any potential that you might have to become an authority. Time magazine found that guests wait a full 15 seconds for a page to load or to meet their needs before closing the window. In a similar study Neilson found that folks were willing to wait an extra 5 seconds for a grand total of 20 seconds. But either way, your site needs to be fast, professional and user friendly to have a shot at being an authority.

Mobility is life. If you don’t have a user friendly mobile site, then you are also not meeting the needs of the majority of the population. Currently Goggle is processing 3.5 billion searches each day and more than half of those are from a mobile device. So if you are not able to be mobile friendly then over half of the searches each day will not apply to you, making you far from an authority.

Focus on the details. Most users are more savvy than the business world gives them credit for. They are hitting websites, scanning for the answer to their question and actually reading all of that stuff that you have on your website. So be sure that everything there is free of issues, that there are no broken links and that users are not getting the dreaded 404 errors messages. Also, be sure that you are not providing duplicate content on various pages, repeating content, quotes or figures and just randomly trying to fill the space to look like a big, grown up website. The user will figure it out and leave, very quickly. And again, that eliminates you from achieving that authority status that is going to land you higher on the search results.

Becoming an authority is about being able to put all of the tiny little details together to provide the best experience for a guest to your site. Of course you will need to have quality content and actual answers to questions but without that final, professional touch on your presentation, you will never be able to become the authority on your widget